Bloomberg: The U.S. Is Losing a Major Front to China in the New Cold War
* Increasingly autocractic regimes find China’s model alluring
* The spread of Beijing’s vision is starting to alarm the U.S.
A swathe of the world is adopting China’s vision for a tightly controlled internet over the unfettered American approach, a stunning ideological coup for Beijing that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.
Vietnam and Thailand are among the Southeast Asian nations warming to a governance model that twins sweeping content curbs with uncompromising data controls -- because it helps preserve the regime in power. A growing number of the region’s increasingly autocratic governments watched enviously the emergence of Chinese corporate titans from Tencent Holdings Ltd. to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. -- in spite of draconian online curbs. And now they want the same.
The more free-wheeling Silicon Valley model once seemed unquestionably the best approach, with stars from Google to Facebook to vouch for its superiority. Now, a re-molding of the internet into a tightly controlled and scrubbed sphere in China’s image is taking place from Russia to India. Yet it’s Southeast Asia that’s the economic and geopolitical linchpin to Chinese ambitions and where U.S.-Chinese tensions will come to a head: a region home to more than half a billion people whose internet economy is expected to triple to $240 billion by 2025.
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WNU Editor: China is offering the entire package to these autocratic regimes. An advanced infrastructure with the means to regulate and control its content. How can they say no?
3 comments:
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Vietnam is nowhere near China. Neither is Thailand. Both are very open societies. True, there's an element of autocracy still and surveillance. .but I bet the author has not lived perhaps not even visited either places. In fact, once people are free it is incredibly difficult to imprison them again. The world is more free today than 50 years ago. We only feel threatened because 1.5 billion of them are now imprisoned in China. You can of course still travel freely but there is a new wave of silence from Hong Kong to mainland. It's like darkness spreading. Not so much Vietnam. The economy is doing great, they are very pro-western and are opening up. Plus they hate the Chinese and their model of tyranny. They know what's going on. They hate it. They new generation wants western freedom. Now is the time to support them. .ideally with something like the TPP. .I hope Trump gets on it. ..I'm sure he will
Of course this warms the cockoles of an AMerica haters heart.
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